Somehow this paper found its way onto my computer: At the Center of the Table: The Rise and Fall of the Olivier Salad by Anna Kustova. It's quite long, but a treasure trove of nostalgia, as it indeed is intended to be, although it's a really serious and long anthropology paper in its academic guise (53 pages, including 10 pages of footnotes).
In the course of the life of the salad, you are treated to the class relations of the salad, the role of hunter-gatherer (or ordinary shopper) under developed socialism, the social life of peas, the rehabilitation of the chicken, the gender bias of sausage, the one-and-only rich, hearty, Soviet Provençal-style mayonnaise, (plenty of scope for a further paper on mayonnaise as substance: "cosmetic; it joins, covers, restores"), commensality in the Soviet home, Nourriture de Passage: The Olivier Salad as a Ritual
Dish in Soviet Cuisine; its status as the “magic of the beginning”; and the place of the Olivier Salad in the gastro-cognitive map.
In fact all human life, and a variety of anthropological themes, are there.
